Dan O'Huiginn

One of many, many things to love about British comics is their uneasy relationship with the idea of the superhero. Alan Moore:

. I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be -- in their current incarnation, at least -- is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth's lower gravity. That's not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn't bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.. I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be -- in their current incarnation, at least -- is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth's lower gravity. That's not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn't bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.

This isn't new (is anything?). Distrust of superheroes, for example, formed a minor part of the postwar public hysteria over "horror comics". Here's a particularly OTT rant from a young Labour MP, in full-throated think of the children populism:

it is the glorification of violence, the educating of children in the detail of every conceivable crime, the playing on sadism, the morbid stimulation of sex, the cultivation of race hatred, the cultivation of contempt for work, the family and authority, and, probably most unhealthy, the cultivation of the idea of the superman and a sort of incipient Fascism.

The fact that Superman had been denounced as Jewish by Goebbels didn't seem to stop this, nor did the broader Jewish context to superhero comics.

Those denunciations aren't in themselves all that interesting; more compelling is the history of British comics toying with these ideas, deconstructing and critiquing the superhero rather than ignoring him. This has been one of the main occupations of British comics from the 80s onwards. Here's Grant Morrison talking it up as national source of pride:

Sick, ironic humour is very cool here. People are poor, drunk and vibrant with twisted creative energy. Taboo-smashing is an artistic pasttime that's become almost passe....It's no surprise we've produced so many spiky, brilliant, politically-motivated creators like Pat Mills, Garth Ennis, Jamie Delano or Warren Ellis. Alan Moore, Mark Millar and I are almost unique among our peers in our genuine fondness for American superhero characters. Otherwise, British writers pretty much HATE superheroes to a man, preferring ultraviolent soldiers, hi-tech vigilantes or kid gangs. In the saccharine world of 80s mainstream US titles it's probably easy to see in hindsight why the British Invasion of the 80s and 90s was so invigorating.

Posted by Dan at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Britain]:

Dale Farm is the largest Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller site in the UK, and part of it is due for demolition. A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s. Over the years, more families came to join them after councils began shutting down public sites and Travellers were forced to look for permanent places to settle.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments. The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.

Posted by Dan at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Python's defaultdict is perfect for making nested dictionaries -- especially useful if you're doing any kind of work with json or nosql. It provides a dict which returns a default value when a key isn't found. Set that default value an empty dict, and you have a convenient dict of dicts:

>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> foo = defaultdict(dict)
>>> foo['x']
{}

But it breaks down when you go more than one layer deep:

>>> foo['x']['y']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
KeyError: 'y'

You can get another layer by passing in a defaultdict of dicts as the default:

>>> bar = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(dict))
>>> bar['x']['y']
{}

But suppose you want deeply-nesting dictionaries. This means you can refer as deeply into the hierarchy as you want, without needing to check whether the intermediate dictionaries have already been created. You do need to be sure that intervening levels aren't anything other than a recursive defaultdict, mind. But if you know you're going to have your content filed away inside, say, quadruple-nested dicts, this isn't necessarily a problem.

One approach would be to extend the method above, with lambdas inside lambdas:

>>> baz = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda:defaultdict(dict)))
>>> baz[1][2][3]
{}
>>> baz[1][2][3][4]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
KeyError: 4
>>> 

It's marginally more readable if we use partial rather than lambda:

>>> thud = defaultdict(partial(defaultdict, partial(defaultdict, dict)))
>>> thud[1][2][3]
{}

But still pretty ugly, and non-extending. Want infinite nesting instead? You can do it with a recursive function:

>>> def infinite_defaultdict():
...     return defaultdict(infinite_defaultdict)
... 
>>> spam = infinite_defaultdict() #defaultdict(infinite_defaultdict) is equivalent
>>> spam['x']['y']['z']['l']['m']
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {})

This works fine. The repr output is annoyingly convoluted, though:

>>> spam = infinite_defaultdict()
>>> spam['x']['y']['z']['l']['m']
defaultdict(, {})
>>> spam
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'x': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'y': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'z': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'l': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'m': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {})})})})})})

A cleaner way of achieving the same effect is to ignore defaultdict entirely, and make a direct subclass of dict. This is based on Peter Norvig's original implementation of defaultdict:

>>> class NestedDict(dict):
...     def __getitem__(self, key):
...         if key in self: return self.get(key)
...         return self.setdefault(key, NestedDict())


>>> eggs = NestedDict()
>>> eggs[1][2][3][4][5]
{}
>>> eggs
{1: {2: {3: {4: {5: {}}}}}}

Posted by Dan at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It occurred to me last night that having a name that Google can't process well might actually be entirely deliberate. On the internet, there is no real underground anymore. So if you wanted to create an underground for yourself, the first thing you might do is generate a sort of lexical darknet by using keyterms search engines can't parse.

[from here, although there's not much else to click through to]

Posted by Dan at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I despair that what it took to puff up the Lib Dems was one good TV appearance and some worship from the media. I'm frankly baffled that the most technocratic and centrist of the parties can paint themselves as outsiders. Seriously? Have you met a lib dem who wasn't a politics junkie. But I'm thrilled by the prospect of a strong LD presence in a hung parliament, leading to AV+ and then to a situation where we can finally get some real politics in the UK.

Meanwhile, it's fun to watch Tories bashing Cameron for accepting the centre ground, just as the left has long been bashing Blair & co. Both criticisms are right, of course: you don't win an argument by accepting your opponent's case.

there is rage, albeit hypocritical and belated, that the entire strategy pursued by the Cameron regime over the past four and a half years has left the party so pathetically incapable of defending itself against this mountebank and his frequently preposterous party. For the strategy has left the Conservative Party - and Mr Cameron in particular, as was clear in the first televised debate - without much in the way of conviction to use to counter the Clegg soufflé, and apparently believing in nothing.

Posted by Dan at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good: Laurie Penny has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Better: she's willing to deliver a well-placed kick to the shins of the organizers, for defending the indefensible, for remaining closed within a tiny bubble of the political elite, and generally for being symptomatic of the fuckwittery of a disconnected and introspective political elite.

Nonetheless, I'm glad of the Orwell Prize, because it has introduced me to Madam Miaow. another excellent shortlisted blog, which I wouldn't otherwise have discovered. And...she's hardly less scathing than Laurie, about "a truly flesh-crawling example of how skewed and corrupt is the mentality of these people who are running and ruining our lives".

Posted by Dan at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anybody still following news here because of the Panama corporate database might like to know about a new site indexing UK company records, including names of their directors. The people behind it explain:

we bought the Companies House appointment snapshot and dropped it into a quick little searchable symfony app so you can browse the data - it's the directors and secretaries of every UK company, cross-linked. Quite handy for looking up your PPCs, ex-MPs, etc. Also handy (if you're a childish prat like me) for looking up funny names (see if you can beat Minge Fan, or Arse Plems Kyentu).

Posted by Dan at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Kyrgyz government was overthrown last week, something I've not yet mentioned here. Partly for obvious lazy-blogger reasons, partly because I was moving house (again) at the time. Partly also because Edil Baisalov, a key figure in the interim government, is also something of a man-about-the-blogospere, and I'm not sure how to correct for the sense of him being a nice guy.

Mainly, though, because I have no answers to the main questions, and no confidence in finding them by churning through online wire reports. Is this a true change of regime, or just of personnel? What reforms will affect anybody beyond the political cliques? Which people are wielding the power, and which are just names on paper? What behind-the-scenes manouvering got this putsch accepted so quickly by the main powers inside and beyond Kyrgyzstan? Will there be any kind of military opposition in the South? How will Bakiyev's supporters rebel, or run campaigns of protest and civil disobedience, or contentrate on the elections XXX is promising? When the election happens, who will accept the results?

I have a lot of sympathy for the now-victorious rebels. They've all tried to engage in democratic politics for many years, and been kept out of the way on trumped up grounds. It was worse under the Akayev regime -- it used the old Soviet trick of forced hospitlization to keep Baisalov away from a political meeting, and excluded Otunbayeva from elections because -- as ambassador to the US -- she had been out of the country. Bakiyev's government wasn't much better: now Baisalov was banned from elections because he posted a photo of a ballot box. The assassination attempt in 2006 was just icing on the cake.

And yet, as Sean Roberts writes, it's hard not to look at these events as just one more link in a chain of coups that will keep going for years or decades to come.

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century - 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people's demands and moves Kyrgyzstan's development forward.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the possibility that this time round things will improve slightly. But it can't be long until Bakiyev's supporters attempt some kind of counter-protest, and it's hard to build an open society while looking over your back for the next coup, especially when you don't have any source of democratic legitimacy.

Posted by Dan at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Radio 3's The Essay had one of its better runs last week, with Michael Bracewell talking about Germany. With only five quarter-hour episodes, he didn't have enough space to say much original about the country itself. But he did a great job of pinning down a 'fantasy of febrile decadence and alienated modernism' which attracted a certain type of arty British punks there. I was a generation too young to be caught up in this particular fantasy -- and had never thought much about Germany before coming here. But it remains utterly comprehensible as a dream; because the worries he describes remain as free-floating cultural sentiments, ready to attach themselves to whatver place or subculture seems momentarily to embody them:

'somewhere in the middle of punk was the idea, fanciful no doubt and swollen with youthful egoism, that we were growing to adulthood in the ruins of history. In every racing, snarling punk record was the message that modernity itself had accelerated to a point of critical mass, and what was left was a tribe of lost urban youth who dressed as though Dickensian urchins had time-travelled to the 23rd century....It flattered us to believe we were living in a new decadence, of melancholy urban ruin, dark covert little bars, and febrile nightclubs, a place caught in the louche cafe culture of the Weimar republic, where young men and women of ambiguous sexuality spent their days and nights in a cocoon of unreality, the better to shut out the premonition of disaster.

Besides, I'd enjoy the turn of phrase even if he was talking nonsense. In fact,I was intrigued enough to look up Bracewell. Unsurprisingly he turns up writing for Frieze, despite the fact that music, rather than art, is obviously his primary love. He's also written a few novels; the reviews online don't tell me much, except that they fall into the stereotypically British genre of people trying hopelessly to find meaning in pedestrian but outwardly painless lives. Putting it enthusiastically:

Bracewell is to Middle England what David Lynch is to Middle America - his is a noticeably eloquent voice disguised by a surreal touch and a poetic sensibility. In Bracewell there is always an attempt to locate some kind of spiritual purpose

Maybe he has done something interesting with this background, but I'm going to chicken out and stick with his writing on culture and pop music. I'm probably in for yet another explanation of how we're living in an age of nostalgia and cultural collage -- but at least it'll be fun to read.

Posted by Dan at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mike points out a very positive-sounding statement by Phil Woolas:

the Government agreed to publish online, on a quarterly basis, information about ministerial meetings with outside interest groups. Information for the period 1 October to 31 December 2009 will be published by Departments as soon as the information is ready.

You can imagine this playing out in all kinds of ways. Some lobby groups will have yet more incentive to maximise their meeting count, regardless of whether they're being listened to, just so they can show to donors how much ministerial conflict they have. Others will be even more desperately trying to figure out how to skirt around the law, arranging for their meetings to be social, unofficial or otherwise off the record. And whether the data is of any use at all will, naturally, depend on whether the political website crowd manage to get anywhere with it.

Relatedly, The Yorkshire Ranter links to the German government site, 'a public version control system for legislation'.

Posted by Dan at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The president of Pakistan tells Seymour Hersh why his army won't do anything silly with nuclear weapons:

Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They're British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?

Not entirely convincing, given that every military coup in Pakistan's history has been led by a British-trained general. Worse still if you start to wonder precisely which tips they might have picked up:

...until they were retired in 1998, the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the bomb itself.

Meanwhile Bruce Sterling has started his annual state of the world interview, an open Q&A which he concocts a grotesque (but plausible) interpretation of the zeitgeist. Always brilliant, it's especially entertaining this year because his contrarian instincts compel him to be optimistic while everybody else is full of gloom. So far, he's completely failing.

Posted by Dan at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So Copenhagen failed, and we're deep into the post-summit finger-pointing. Maybe we'll be able to analyze the scatter-pattern of accusations, retrace what went wrong, and fix it. More likely we'll just use the blame game as a convenient distraction from figuring out what to do next.

My favourite -- both as an article, and because I agree with him -- is Joss Garman in the Independent. He's fiery about Obama ("a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii"), and Wen Jiabao ("sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager's house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere."). But he still finds a few likeable figures, such as Lula and Ed Miliband.

Mark Lynas is more simplistic. His much-forwarded Guardian piece has one villain: China

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.... China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and thenensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again.

Lynas staunchly defends both Gordon Brown and his own employer, the government of the Maldives*, while attacking the country chosen by both the British and American governments to carry the can. He tries very hard to present this support of the powerful as a contrarian position -- and, given he's writing for Guardian readers, I suppose it is. George Monbiot's article, for example, is more typical in blaming America. "The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama".

Lynas also snaps out a not-entirely-unfounded accusation against the NGO world: "Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken".

It's a shame he doesn't go into more detail on this. Developing countries seem to have largely outsourced their negotiating teams in environmental summits to NGOs, and to first-world campaigners willing to work cheaply for the good of the planet. It's the same trade of influence against expertise that happens when they rely on multinational corporations to provide legal or economic advice in trade negotiations -- just with added idealism. This area must conceal some fascinating culture clashes and conflicts of interest, which I'd love to see somebody dissect for public consumption.

• It's hardly encouraging that the Guardian lets Lynas gush about the president of the Maldives without mentioning his conflict of interest.

Posted by Dan at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inspired by the Swiss minaret ban, a reasonably unpleasant German group is trying to force a pan-European referendum on banning minarets. Apparently

The Lisbon Treaty, which has now entered into force, contains a provision for referenda subsequent to the collection of one million signatures in favor of the measure in question. Just how such a process might work, however, has yet to be sufficiently established.

If that's true, surely we're about to be deluged in referendums? A million signatures on a European level is nothing. It's the kind of number Greenpeace could collect without breaking a sweat, for instance, let alone any party organization.

I can't find much trace of it in the Lisbon Treaty (but the treaty is massive, and I have no idea where to look). The closest is this delightfully vague and toothless provision:

Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties. The procedures and conditions required for such a citizens' initiative shall be determined in accordance with the first paragraph of Article 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. [article 8A.4]

Posted by Dan at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One one level, I know that mentioning French laws on the burqa is just playing into the UMPs tactics, which are basically a skilled case of legislative trolling. Ensure that what should be a non-issue stays constantly in the news, divert liberal energy into making a right-but-unpopular case, provide an way of expressing islamophobia under cover of women's rights, keep the fear and distrust simmering.

Anyway, Libération has some more details on the form the law is likely to take. "So as not to appear discriminatory", they write with justifiable snarkiness, the law will be against any covering of the entire face within a public space. Presumably they'll spend the coming weeks assuring exceptions for skiiers, motorcyclists, beekeepers, and anyone else with a non-religious reason to cover their face. [I guess they won't do anything about balaclava-wearing anarchists, oddly enough;)]

Meanwhile laïcite is being played in the other direction, in reaction to the Swiss minaret ban. At least, it is providing the language in which to condemn a statement that "when there are more minarets than Cathedrals in France, it will no longer be France".

Posted by Dan at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.

C'est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d'explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d'autres priorités.

Posted by Dan at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Britain]:

Dale Farm is the largest Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller site in the UK, and part of it is due for demolition. A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s. Over the years, more families came to join them after councils began shutting down public sites and Travellers were forced to look for permanent places to settle.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments. The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.

Posted by Dan at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Python's defaultdict is perfect for making nested dictionaries -- especially useful if you're doing any kind of work with json or nosql. It provides a dict which returns a default value when a key isn't found. Set that default value an empty dict, and you have a convenient dict of dicts:

>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> foo = defaultdict(dict)
>>> foo['x']
{}

But it breaks down when you go more than one layer deep:

>>> foo['x']['y']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
KeyError: 'y'

You can get another layer by passing in a defaultdict of dicts as the default:

>>> bar = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(dict))
>>> bar['x']['y']
{}

But suppose you want deeply-nesting dictionaries. This means you can refer as deeply into the hierarchy as you want, without needing to check whether the intermediate dictionaries have already been created. You do need to be sure that intervening levels aren't anything other than a recursive defaultdict, mind. But if you know you're going to have your content filed away inside, say, quadruple-nested dicts, this isn't necessarily a problem.

One approach would be to extend the method above, with lambdas inside lambdas:

>>> baz = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda:defaultdict(dict)))
>>> baz[1][2][3]
{}
>>> baz[1][2][3][4]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
KeyError: 4
>>> 

It's marginally more readable if we use partial rather than lambda:

>>> thud = defaultdict(partial(defaultdict, partial(defaultdict, dict)))
>>> thud[1][2][3]
{}

But still pretty ugly, and non-extending. Want infinite nesting instead? You can do it with a recursive function:

>>> def infinite_defaultdict():
...     return defaultdict(infinite_defaultdict)
... 
>>> spam = infinite_defaultdict() #defaultdict(infinite_defaultdict) is equivalent
>>> spam['x']['y']['z']['l']['m']
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {})

This works fine. The repr output is annoyingly convoluted, though:

>>> spam = infinite_defaultdict()
>>> spam['x']['y']['z']['l']['m']
defaultdict(, {})
>>> spam
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'x': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'y': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'z': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'l': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {'m': 
defaultdict(<function infinite_defaultdict at 0x7fe4fb0c9de8>, {})})})})})})

A cleaner way of achieving the same effect is to ignore defaultdict entirely, and make a direct subclass of dict. This is based on Peter Norvig's original implementation of defaultdict:

>>> class NestedDict(dict):
...     def __getitem__(self, key):
...         if key in self: return self.get(key)
...         return self.setdefault(key, NestedDict())


>>> eggs = NestedDict()
>>> eggs[1][2][3][4][5]
{}
>>> eggs
{1: {2: {3: {4: {5: {}}}}}}

Posted by Dan at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It occurred to me last night that having a name that Google can't process well might actually be entirely deliberate. On the internet, there is no real underground anymore. So if you wanted to create an underground for yourself, the first thing you might do is generate a sort of lexical darknet by using keyterms search engines can't parse.

[from here, although there's not much else to click through to]

Posted by Dan at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I despair that what it took to puff up the Lib Dems was one good TV appearance and some worship from the media. I'm frankly baffled that the most technocratic and centrist of the parties can paint themselves as outsiders. Seriously? Have you met a lib dem who wasn't a politics junkie. But I'm thrilled by the prospect of a strong LD presence in a hung parliament, leading to AV+ and then to a situation where we can finally get some real politics in the UK.

Meanwhile, it's fun to watch Tories bashing Cameron for accepting the centre ground, just as the left has long been bashing Blair & co. Both criticisms are right, of course: you don't win an argument by accepting your opponent's case.

there is rage, albeit hypocritical and belated, that the entire strategy pursued by the Cameron regime over the past four and a half years has left the party so pathetically incapable of defending itself against this mountebank and his frequently preposterous party. For the strategy has left the Conservative Party - and Mr Cameron in particular, as was clear in the first televised debate - without much in the way of conviction to use to counter the Clegg soufflé, and apparently believing in nothing.

Posted by Dan at 7:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good: Laurie Penny has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Better: she's willing to deliver a well-placed kick to the shins of the organizers, for defending the indefensible, for remaining closed within a tiny bubble of the political elite, and generally for being symptomatic of the fuckwittery of a disconnected and introspective political elite.

Nonetheless, I'm glad of the Orwell Prize, because it has introduced me to Madam Miaow. another excellent shortlisted blog, which I wouldn't otherwise have discovered. And...she's hardly less scathing than Laurie, about "a truly flesh-crawling example of how skewed and corrupt is the mentality of these people who are running and ruining our lives".

Posted by Dan at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anybody still following news here because of the Panama corporate database might like to know about a new site indexing UK company records, including names of their directors. The people behind it explain:

we bought the Companies House appointment snapshot and dropped it into a quick little searchable symfony app so you can browse the data - it's the directors and secretaries of every UK company, cross-linked. Quite handy for looking up your PPCs, ex-MPs, etc. Also handy (if you're a childish prat like me) for looking up funny names (see if you can beat Minge Fan, or Arse Plems Kyentu).

Posted by Dan at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Kyrgyz government was overthrown last week, something I've not yet mentioned here. Partly for obvious lazy-blogger reasons, partly because I was moving house (again) at the time. Partly also because Edil Baisalov, a key figure in the interim government, is also something of a man-about-the-blogospere, and I'm not sure how to correct for the sense of him being a nice guy.

Mainly, though, because I have no answers to the main questions, and no confidence in finding them by churning through online wire reports. Is this a true change of regime, or just of personnel? What reforms will affect anybody beyond the political cliques? Which people are wielding the power, and which are just names on paper? What behind-the-scenes manouvering got this putsch accepted so quickly by the main powers inside and beyond Kyrgyzstan? Will there be any kind of military opposition in the South? How will Bakiyev's supporters rebel, or run campaigns of protest and civil disobedience, or contentrate on the elections XXX is promising? When the election happens, who will accept the results?

I have a lot of sympathy for the now-victorious rebels. They've all tried to engage in democratic politics for many years, and been kept out of the way on trumped up grounds. It was worse under the Akayev regime -- it used the old Soviet trick of forced hospitlization to keep Baisalov away from a political meeting, and excluded Otunbayeva from elections because -- as ambassador to the US -- she had been out of the country. Bakiyev's government wasn't much better: now Baisalov was banned from elections because he posted a photo of a ballot box. The assassination attempt in 2006 was just icing on the cake.

And yet, as Sean Roberts writes, it's hard not to look at these events as just one more link in a chain of coups that will keep going for years or decades to come.

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century - 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people's demands and moves Kyrgyzstan's development forward.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the possibility that this time round things will improve slightly. But it can't be long until Bakiyev's supporters attempt some kind of counter-protest, and it's hard to build an open society while looking over your back for the next coup, especially when you don't have any source of democratic legitimacy.

Posted by Dan at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Radio 3's The Essay had one of its better runs last week, with Michael Bracewell talking about Germany. With only five quarter-hour episodes, he didn't have enough space to say much original about the country itself. But he did a great job of pinning down a 'fantasy of febrile decadence and alienated modernism' which attracted a certain type of arty British punks there. I was a generation too young to be caught up in this particular fantasy -- and had never thought much about Germany before coming here. But it remains utterly comprehensible as a dream; because the worries he describes remain as free-floating cultural sentiments, ready to attach themselves to whatver place or subculture seems momentarily to embody them:

'somewhere in the middle of punk was the idea, fanciful no doubt and swollen with youthful egoism, that we were growing to adulthood in the ruins of history. In every racing, snarling punk record was the message that modernity itself had accelerated to a point of critical mass, and what was left was a tribe of lost urban youth who dressed as though Dickensian urchins had time-travelled to the 23rd century....It flattered us to believe we were living in a new decadence, of melancholy urban ruin, dark covert little bars, and febrile nightclubs, a place caught in the louche cafe culture of the Weimar republic, where young men and women of ambiguous sexuality spent their days and nights in a cocoon of unreality, the better to shut out the premonition of disaster.

Besides, I'd enjoy the turn of phrase even if he was talking nonsense. In fact,I was intrigued enough to look up Bracewell. Unsurprisingly he turns up writing for Frieze, despite the fact that music, rather than art, is obviously his primary love. He's also written a few novels; the reviews online don't tell me much, except that they fall into the stereotypically British genre of people trying hopelessly to find meaning in pedestrian but outwardly painless lives. Putting it enthusiastically:

Bracewell is to Middle England what David Lynch is to Middle America - his is a noticeably eloquent voice disguised by a surreal touch and a poetic sensibility. In Bracewell there is always an attempt to locate some kind of spiritual purpose

Maybe he has done something interesting with this background, but I'm going to chicken out and stick with his writing on culture and pop music. I'm probably in for yet another explanation of how we're living in an age of nostalgia and cultural collage -- but at least it'll be fun to read.

Posted by Dan at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mike points out a very positive-sounding statement by Phil Woolas:

the Government agreed to publish online, on a quarterly basis, information about ministerial meetings with outside interest groups. Information for the period 1 October to 31 December 2009 will be published by Departments as soon as the information is ready.

You can imagine this playing out in all kinds of ways. Some lobby groups will have yet more incentive to maximise their meeting count, regardless of whether they're being listened to, just so they can show to donors how much ministerial conflict they have. Others will be even more desperately trying to figure out how to skirt around the law, arranging for their meetings to be social, unofficial or otherwise off the record. And whether the data is of any use at all will, naturally, depend on whether the political website crowd manage to get anywhere with it.

Relatedly, The Yorkshire Ranter links to the German government site, 'a public version control system for legislation'.

Posted by Dan at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The president of Pakistan tells Seymour Hersh why his army won't do anything silly with nuclear weapons:

Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They're British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?

Not entirely convincing, given that every military coup in Pakistan's history has been led by a British-trained general. Worse still if you start to wonder precisely which tips they might have picked up:

...until they were retired in 1998, the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the bomb itself.

Meanwhile Bruce Sterling has started his annual state of the world interview, an open Q&A which he concocts a grotesque (but plausible) interpretation of the zeitgeist. Always brilliant, it's especially entertaining this year because his contrarian instincts compel him to be optimistic while everybody else is full of gloom. So far, he's completely failing.

Posted by Dan at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So Copenhagen failed, and we're deep into the post-summit finger-pointing. Maybe we'll be able to analyze the scatter-pattern of accusations, retrace what went wrong, and fix it. More likely we'll just use the blame game as a convenient distraction from figuring out what to do next.

My favourite -- both as an article, and because I agree with him -- is Joss Garman in the Independent. He's fiery about Obama ("a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii"), and Wen Jiabao ("sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager's house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere."). But he still finds a few likeable figures, such as Lula and Ed Miliband.

Mark Lynas is more simplistic. His much-forwarded Guardian piece has one villain: China

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.... China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and thenensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again.

Lynas staunchly defends both Gordon Brown and his own employer, the government of the Maldives*, while attacking the country chosen by both the British and American governments to carry the can. He tries very hard to present this support of the powerful as a contrarian position -- and, given he's writing for Guardian readers, I suppose it is. George Monbiot's article, for example, is more typical in blaming America. "The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama".

Lynas also snaps out a not-entirely-unfounded accusation against the NGO world: "Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken".

It's a shame he doesn't go into more detail on this. Developing countries seem to have largely outsourced their negotiating teams in environmental summits to NGOs, and to first-world campaigners willing to work cheaply for the good of the planet. It's the same trade of influence against expertise that happens when they rely on multinational corporations to provide legal or economic advice in trade negotiations -- just with added idealism. This area must conceal some fascinating culture clashes and conflicts of interest, which I'd love to see somebody dissect for public consumption.

• It's hardly encouraging that the Guardian lets Lynas gush about the president of the Maldives without mentioning his conflict of interest.

Posted by Dan at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Inspired by the Swiss minaret ban, a reasonably unpleasant German group is trying to force a pan-European referendum on banning minarets. Apparently

The Lisbon Treaty, which has now entered into force, contains a provision for referenda subsequent to the collection of one million signatures in favor of the measure in question. Just how such a process might work, however, has yet to be sufficiently established.

If that's true, surely we're about to be deluged in referendums? A million signatures on a European level is nothing. It's the kind of number Greenpeace could collect without breaking a sweat, for instance, let alone any party organization.

I can't find much trace of it in the Lisbon Treaty (but the treaty is massive, and I have no idea where to look). The closest is this delightfully vague and toothless provision:

Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties. The procedures and conditions required for such a citizens' initiative shall be determined in accordance with the first paragraph of Article 21 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. [article 8A.4]

Posted by Dan at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One one level, I know that mentioning French laws on the burqa is just playing into the UMPs tactics, which are basically a skilled case of legislative trolling. Ensure that what should be a non-issue stays constantly in the news, divert liberal energy into making a right-but-unpopular case, provide an way of expressing islamophobia under cover of women's rights, keep the fear and distrust simmering.

Anyway, Libération has some more details on the form the law is likely to take. "So as not to appear discriminatory", they write with justifiable snarkiness, the law will be against any covering of the entire face within a public space. Presumably they'll spend the coming weeks assuring exceptions for skiiers, motorcyclists, beekeepers, and anyone else with a non-religious reason to cover their face. [I guess they won't do anything about balaclava-wearing anarchists, oddly enough;)]

Meanwhile laïcite is being played in the other direction, in reaction to the Swiss minaret ban. At least, it is providing the language in which to condemn a statement that "when there are more minarets than Cathedrals in France, it will no longer be France".

Posted by Dan at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.

C'est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d'explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d'autres priorités.

Posted by Dan at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)